Theatre in Ottawa and the region Archives - Page 60 of 92 - Capital Critics' Circle / Le cercle des critiques de la capitale

Toto Too’s “Hosanna”: a masterful performance by Barry Daley

By Alvina Ruprecht | January 23, 2016

Photo Maria Vartanova

Toto Too Theatre gave us the lively, exciting and beautifully executed musical Avenue Q last season and last night, this versatile company opened a show of a different sort at “Live on Elgin : Hosanna, the ground-breaking two-hander written by Michel Tremblay , first performed in 1973 in French at the Théâtre de Quat’Sous directed by André Brassard. It was followed by the one act monologue which gives voice to La Duchesse de Langeais, a legendary role that actor Claude Gai made his own and that has been performed in Ottawa several times in English and in French. La Duchesse is one of the regular flamboyant drag queens who gets together with Sandra and her gang to humiliate Hosanna on Hallowe’en evening, the event that precedes the opening of our play. The moment Hosanna comes rushing on stage, she breaks into tears, shaking with anger and humiliation. The play then comes full circle as the second part of the evening gives Hosanna her extraordinary monologue where she tells us the whole story of Elizabeth Taylor, Cleopatra, that builds up to that fairy tale-like evening and the final insulting trick all the drag queens of the Main play on her, throwing her dreams back in her face. What happens then is the final part of this briliant play.

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Matchstick at the GCTC. A gripping, disquieting drama

By Patrick Langston | January 23, 2016

Photo: Electric Umbrella Images

You may realize earlier or later than your seatmate what is really going on here, but exactly when the penny drops doesn’t matter. What does matter is the intake of breath, the muttered imprecation when you suddenly understand that Matchstick, an odd and intensely original folk musical that starts out in fairy tale-like fashion, is becoming bigger and darker than you ever anticipated. The fairy tale is morphing into real life, and it’s not life as you’d choose to have it.

Playwright Nathan Howe’s story begins in An Undesirable Country where a young, motherless girl named Matchstick (Lauren Holfeuer) is locked out of her home by a cruel father. In Grimm Brothers style, she journeys to a big, soulless city. There, she’s taken in by an aunt (seen only in a photograph that Holfeuer holds aloft while speaking the aunt’s lines) and her reluctant husband (Howe, in one of multiple roles).

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Jack Charles Versus The Crown ILBIJERRI Theatre Company (Melbourne, Australia). A Remarquable Performance.

By Patrick Langston | January 15, 2016

Photographer Bindi Cole

At one point in this remarkable show about his own life as a damaged Indigenous person in Australia and the collective experience of colonized Aboriginal people almost anywhere, Jack Charles sings the 1957 Connie Francis hit Who’s Sorry Now?

It seems an odd choice, this very white song by a very white singer from a very white time in America. Charles, backed by the tight, three-piece band that plays on and off through the show, sings the song in a jaunty, absolutely straight fashion, so while you know it’s meant to be ironic (after all, how sorry are we really about our treatment of Indigenous peoples?), his delivery leaves the import entirely up to us. Heck, he may even be singing the song, one of several in the show, just because he likes it.

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Underpants Droop At The Gladstone

By Jamie Portman | January 10, 2016

If you can believe the people at Ottawa’s fledgling Theatre Kraken, people actually had working radios back in the days when Germany possessed an emperor and housewives still wore below-the-knee bloomers as underwear.

In truth, however, such discrepancies merely define this company’s production of The Underpants as a historical mish-mash.

It’s also a mish-mash when it comes to style, performance and the accents of the characters. All of which helps to make the evening a glum and pointless theatrical experience.

Promotion for this appallingly misconceived theatrical event has emphasized the name of comedian Steve Martin who is responsible for this adaptation of German playwright Carl Sternheim’s 1911 expressionist satire of bourgeois values. The piece will never rank as one of Martin’s shining creative moments, lacking the wit and verbal agility of his earlier play, Picasso At The Lapine Agile — but Don Fex’s production at the Gladstone Theatre makes it seem even worse, giving more heed to the text’s sophomoric sexual double entendres than its more cutting elements of social and political satire. The latter are largely trampled under.

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Les Reines de Normand Chaurette: on retient surtout le merveilleux travail des comédiennes.

By Alvina Ruprecht | December 15, 2015

Un décor gris de désolation balayé par un vent ronflant qui glace le sang… On entend la tempête qui fait rage, et des lambeaux de tissus, pendus sur un alignement de châssis peints, laissent deviner de fantomatiques créatures, rongées par le désir le plus viscéral du pouvoir. Les six figures féminines font leur apparition et nous projettent aussitôt dans un paysage mental inquiétant. Une création efficace, vu la difficulté du texte, et l’expérience limitée de ces jeunes actrices, inscrites au programme de formation théâtrale à l’Université d’Ottawa. …

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Winnie-the-Pooh: A Retreat Into Nostalgia

By Jamie Portman | December 12, 2015

Photo: William Beddoe. Chris Ralph (Winnie) and David Gerow (Eeyore)

There’s something decidedly inviting about the shared pleasure of spending time with Winnie The Pooh and his friends.

So you’re conscious of a strong sense of community when you arrive at the Gladstone Theatre for Plosive Productions’ latest Christmas bow to the glory days of radio.

In this instance, it’s a simple matter of audience members engaging in a special way with the people at the microphones. And the task of Winnie-the-Pooh: The Radio Show is to recreate through voice and a bit of body language the magical world created by author A.A. Milne in his Pooh Bear tales.

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GCTC’s Angel Square brings the good and the bad of post-war Ottawa to audiences

By Kat Fournier | December 9, 2015

Photo: Barb Gray

Solve the crime and win the girl’s heart, all in time for Christmas. Superficially, Angel Square presents a sweet holiday yarn, but just below the surface we get a glimpse at race politics through the eyes of children, and a hopeful depiction of Ottawa’s working class heritage. Brian Doyle’s classic novel by the same name is newly adapted and directed by Janet Irwin. The production recounts twelve-year-old Tommy’s memory of Lowertown, Ottawa (Ontario, Canada, Planet Earth, The Universe) in 1945. It is the first Christmas after World War II and the impact of the war—from war rations to a sense of post-war relief—peppers the script, while anti-Semitism rears its ugly head.

Tommy (played by Bruce Spinney) is gutted that his best Jewish friend, Sammy, has left town. Sammy’s father has been badly beaten up and sent to a hospital in Kingston. Inspired by his superhero idol, The Shadow, Tommy is determined to find the ‘bad guy’. Stylistically, this production rides the line between being a memory play and youth theatre. Janet Irwin’s adaptation maintains Tommy’s role as the narrator of the story, while thrusting him inside the action of the play as he recalls the events leading up to Christmas.

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Anne and Gilbert: A slick, attractive production and a worthy sequel to the 1965 musical Anne of Green Gables.

By Iris Winston | December 7, 2015

Photos by Barbara Gray

Now a decade after its creation, Anne and Gilbert The Musical is firmly established as not only a worthy sequel to the much loved 1965 musical Anne of Green Gables, but also as a Canadian theatre standard.

Based on Lucy Maud Montgomery’s second and third novels about the feisty red-haired orphan, Anne and Gilbert follows her adventures at Redmond (a.k.a. Dalhousie University). She makes a new friend, the wealthy Philippa, finds a new beau in Roy and continues to deny that she loves Gilbert Blythe — when everyone else knows otherwise.

Knowing how the story will end is of no importance. Anne and Gilbert is primarily a celebration of a way of life in a small island village in the early 20^th century. (Little wonder that P.E.I. tourism has set up a booth, complete with assorted Anne souvenirs, in the NAC lobby. A catchy number such as You’re Island Through and Through tempts you to take a trip to the island.)

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Suzart’s “The Music Man” spreads a glow of excitement.

By Iris Winston | December 6, 2015

Sign for the production.

The Suzart slogan of “If you can dream it, you can do it” is a partial explanation of the reason that the company is successful in mounting ambitious, large-cast musicals that aim to entertain whole families on stage and off.

In the case of Meredith Willson’s 1957 musical The Music Man, director Kraig Paul Proulx, supported by musical director Mark Allen, the always resourceful set designer Elaine McCausland and costume designer Ingrid Hunt, brings a delightful warmth to the story of con man Harold Hill.

Hill’s goal of cheating the townsfolk is tripped up by romance, while he promotes the “think system” to develop a band. Strange to tell, after a summer of dreaming it, the band members find they can do it.

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Les Reines: A play worth any stage in Canada!

By Rajka Stefanovska | December 6, 2015

Graphic courtesy of the Department of Theatre at the University of Ottawa

Normand Chaurette’ play Les Reines is one of the best examples of surrealism in literature. Inspired by Shakespeare’s play Richard III, he looks at the political events of the late fifteenth century in England from the women’s perspective.

The play starts at the end of the 15^th century when the king of England, Edward IV, is dying. His death is followed by a succession of tragedies. In his greed for power, the future king, Richard III, is about to kill two sons of the queen Elizabeth. At that time, urged by their own aspiration for the throne, six queens, Queen Elizabeth, the Warick sisters Anne and Isabelle, Queen Margaret, Anne Dexter and the old Duchess of York, come to the castle. There, they live out their nightmares, fight for royal ambitions and struggle with personal terrors. Either as mothers, present or future queens or wives, they wrestle their own demons. Craving power, they are unable to separate the royal from the personal. Therefore, in the atmosphere of inevitable death and in their confusion and powerlessness to change destiny, they throw their fears at each other. …

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